Sunday, May 13, 2018

I can finally share some big news with you. Tatoeba will be receiving $25,000 via the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program. This was a long process, but it's now finally official :)

A little bit of background story.

Back in October last year, folks from Mozilla got in touch with us to explore possible ways of collaboration. They're working on a project called Common Voice and with this project they basically want to collect people's voice. A lot of it.

To achieve this, they need sentences for people to read. Someone told them about Tatoeba... And that's how it started.

But it's not that simple.

One of the requirements of Common Voice is to be able to release their data under CC0 (the Creative Commons version of public domain). Tatoeba's data is CC-BY. Common Voice cannot reuse CC-BY sentences to record audio that they'll publish as CC-0. They can only reuse sentences that are in the public domain or CC0.

So there's quite some work to do there, if we want to let Common Voice reuse sentences from Tatoeba. This is what the MOSS award is for. We cannot change our CC-BY license for the data we've released so far. But we can evolve Tatoeba to handle more licenses than just CC-BY.

I'll be explaining more in details later on what changes we plan to do exactly. But until then, I would really like to have an idea where the Tatoeba community stands on this matter.